haven of retrosexuality

Made exploratory foray no.2 after work to find Grandma's Bar, which bills itself as a "retro-sexual haven of cosmopolitan kitsch and faded granny glamour. " It's one of those places wedged in the basement of a guitar shop, which is why we didn't find it first time around.

I think the use of the word 'glamour' is subjective, and very much a definition of the word with which I am not familiar.

Very much kitted out with the kind of furniture that uni students used to have (in the days when uni students didn't have to pay $100,000 for the privilege of enrolling for a degree from a university). Little nests of brown tables; chipped coronation mugs; a tiki on the wall; a few balls of wool with knitting needles stuck in them, arranged in a bowl; 1960s/1970s lounge suites; the odd doily...you get the idea. Wasn't enough 'faded granny glamour' to lighten the spartan brown poverty-stricken-cheap-housing mood.

To further the uni student connection, snacks were offered, in the form of baked bean or spaghetti jaffles, which took me back to my own days of living on Austudy -assuming uni students could afford to pay $8 (5 pound 48p/$8.34 US) for a baked bean jaffle, that is.

It was a harmless place. And it was staffed by cheerful young, friendly lads. Good on them for their enterprise.

Their only mistake, I think, was in assuming that everybody would jump at the chance to pay inflated inner-city wine bar prices for a drink in a basement that had been furnished with items salvaged from the Salvation Army's reject pile. The wallpaper was the most colourful and attractive thing in the joint.

If you're in your twenties, you'd probably love it because you'd never lived with that sort of furniture and it would therefore be cool. The grumpy old cow voice in my head was solely preoccupied with trying to figure out how draping a bit of hand-knitted scarf over a deer's antler could be interpreted as hip and groovy. And why wasn't there any shagpile carpet?

But I'm just showing my age.